Best Apps to Learn Norwegian After Duolingo: 7 Tools That Actually Take You to B1

If you've finished the Duolingo Norwegian tree, you're in a strange place. You can read short sentences. You recognise hundreds of common words. You've internalised some of the grammar without ever being formally taught it. But sit you down in front of a real Norwegian newspaper or a children's book and the whole thing collapses. Half the words are unfamiliar, the sentences are longer than anything you've practised, and you don't know whether boka and boken are the same word.

This is the post-Duolingo plateau. It's incredibly common, and most learners stay stuck here for years. The honest truth is that no single app gets you from A2 to B1 — you need to start consuming real input, and you need tools that match how grown-ups actually learn languages. This article walks through seven apps and explains what each one is genuinely good for, including ours. The aim isn't to sell you on LingueLibrary; it's to help you pick the right tool for the goal you actually have.

Some context: I'm Norwegian, I built LingueLibrary in part to learn Italian myself, and I've used most of these apps as a learner over the years. Where a competitor is the better choice for a given goal, I'll say so.

Why Duolingo Plateaus (and That's Not a Failure)

Duolingo's Norwegian course is genuinely good — for what it is. It teaches you a few thousand high-frequency words, gets you comfortable with Bokmål's word order, and embeds the basic article system in your head through sheer repetition. By the end of the tree, most learners are around mid-A2 in reading and listening — they can handle simple, predictable sentences but get lost the moment things get authentic.

The reason isn't that Duolingo is bad. It's that the gap between A2 and B1 isn't another 5,000 sentence drills. It's the gap between recognising patterns in carefully simplified content and parsing real Norwegian written by Norwegians for Norwegians. Closing that gap requires:

• Volume of real input — books, articles, podcasts, TV. Lots of it.
• Contextual lookup — when you hit an unknown word, you need to look it up in three seconds, not three minutes, or you'll lose the thread.
• Grammar scaffolding — when you encounter a strange verb form, you want to see the conjugation table without leaving the page.
• Output practice — at some point you'll want to speak and write, not just consume.

Different apps tackle different parts of this. None of them solve it all. The trick is matching the tool to the goal you actually have right now.

The 7 Apps Compared

Here are the seven I'd actually recommend, with qualitative price tiers (specific prices change too often to nail down — always check the provider's site before paying):

Duolingo

Don't quit Duolingo when you start branching out. The streak is genuinely useful as a daily-touch habit, and the gamification works. But understand what it is: a vocabulary and grammar drilling app, not a path to fluency. After you finish the tree, the legendary levels and stories give you something to do, but they don't fundamentally change what the app teaches. If your goal is to actually read Norwegian, Duolingo isn't going to get you there.

Babbel

Babbel feels more grown-up than Duolingo. The lessons are taught with explicit grammar explanations, and the dialogues are more practical. If you found Duolingo too gamey and want something that feels more like a textbook with audio, Babbel is the obvious next step. Where it falls short for the post-Duolingo crowd: it's still lesson-based. You're not reading authentic content; you're working through curated dialogues. That's fine — but if your goal is reading books, Babbel doesn't move the needle much.

LingQ

LingQ is the closest competitor to LingueLibrary in spirit. Steve Kaufmann built it on the principle that you learn languages by reading and listening to lots of real content with one-tap word lookup. The Norwegian library is decent — there's a mix of imported public-domain books, podcasts, and articles. The lookup works.

What makes LingQ frustrating: the UX. The interface looks dated, the import flow is fiddly, and the content isn't level-graded — you either find a text that's at your level or you don't. For motivated, patient learners willing to do the work of finding their own material, it's a serious tool. For most people, the friction wins and they bounce.

Drops

Drops is essentially a beautiful flashcard app for vocabulary, with each word paired to an illustration. Five minutes a day, swipe through pictures and the Norwegian word, internalise it. It's not going to get you to B1 by itself — it doesn't really teach grammar — but as a top-up for vocabulary while you do other things, it's pleasant. I'd treat it as dessert, not the main course.

Memrise

Memrise's distinctive feature is the short clips of native Norwegians saying the words and phrases you're learning. That's genuinely valuable for ear training, especially because Norwegian dialects vary so much. The spaced-repetition system is solid. The downside is the same as most flashcard apps: you're learning vocabulary in isolation, not in the context of a real story or article. Strong for retention, weaker for actual reading practice.

Glossika

Glossika is the listening-and-repeating app. Thousands of sentences, native speakers, you parrot them back. If your goal is to train your ears and start producing complete Norwegian sentences out loud, Glossika is one of the few apps doing it well. The premium pricing reflects how hands-on the audio production is. It's a complement to reading-focused tools, not a replacement.

LingueLibrary

Full disclosure: this is the app I'm building. The pitch is narrow on purpose — it's a reader for people stuck at exactly the post-Duolingo stage. The library is real books (Sherlock Holmes, classic short stories, contemporary novels), each rewritten at A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2 levels using AI, so you can read the same story at exactly your reading level. Tap any word and you get an instant translation, the lemma, the conjugation or declension table, and a sentence translation if you need one.

Where it isn't right: if you want to learn to speak Norwegian, this isn't the tool. We don't do speaking practice. If you want curated grammar lessons, get Babbel. If you want to drill vocabulary, get Drops or Memrise. LingueLibrary is for one specific moment in your learning journey — when you've outgrown apps but native books still feel too hard.

Match the Tool to the Goal

Most of the disagreement online about "best language app" is people arguing past each other because they have different goals. Here's a clean breakdown:

If your goal is to read books and articles in Norwegian

Use LingueLibrary or LingQ. Both are built around reading with one-tap lookup. LingueLibrary gives you curated, level-graded books with built-in grammar tables; LingQ gives you total flexibility to import your own texts. Pick LingueLibrary if you want a polished out-of-the-box experience; pick LingQ if you've got specific content you want to import and don't mind the rougher UX.

If your goal is to understand spoken Norwegian

Use Glossika or Memrise. Glossika trains comprehension and production at the sentence level; Memrise gives you short native-speaker clips tied to specific words and phrases. Combine them with watching NRK content (the public broadcaster has a lot of free programming) and you'll start to make sense of dialects within a few months.

If your goal is to learn grammar properly

Use Babbel, ideally alongside a free reference like the Norsk for deg website or a paperback grammar book. Babbel's lessons are explicit about grammar in a way Duolingo isn't. If you want to know why Norwegian works the way it does, lesson-based apps will explain better than any reading app.

If your goal is to drill vocabulary

Use Drops or Memrise, probably for 5–15 minutes a day, on top of whatever your main tool is. SRS-based vocabulary drilling is genuinely useful — but only as a supplement, not as the main thing. Reading and listening are how vocabulary really sticks; flashcards reinforce what you already half-know.

The Honest Verdict

There is no single best app. There's only the right tool for the goal you have right now. If you've finished Duolingo and feel stuck, the most likely thing you're missing is volume of real input — and the path to fluency goes through reading and listening to lots of authentic Norwegian. Pick a primary tool that handles that core need (LingueLibrary, LingQ, or Glossika depending on whether you prefer reading or listening), and consider a secondary tool that fills the gap (Memrise for ear training, or Babbel for grammar reinforcement).

If you want to read your way to B1 — and you're tired of curated lessons — that's exactly what we built LingueLibrary for. The first chapter of every book is free during the trial; if reading at your level is what you've been missing, you'll know within the first session.

Looking for more? See our guides on 5 Easy Norwegian Books for B1 Learners and Free Norwegian Graded Readers for next steps once you've picked your tool.